Thursday, July 30, 2009

Some very kind and appreciated praise for the Lucky Man. Not to mention The Adventures of Milo and Otis. And Dudley Moore. Sweet.

We are having a good week and we are most appreciative. Today we want to share an excerpt from a most lengthy and wonderful review of Lucky Man which is up on Goodreads, name drops both The Adventures of Milo and Otis and Dudley Moore, and is courtesy of one Brandon Will. Many thanks Brandon for the very kind comments and drinks on us for sure when next we meet.

"The story moves fast. Huge events happen, little moments happen, all the while it keeps moving forward, rolling along, like the neverending calendar-page-flips of life itself, which is I think what the book is about. It's about friends growing up, and growing apart, and having to live in themselves in the day which contains all the days you've had to live through before. The rolling pace makes it feel almost like the cliff's notes to the saga of a group of friends' dissolving ties. Which is really kind of depressing, in a "The Adventures of Milo and Otis" kind of way. That movie really depressed the hell out of me when I was a kid, going around compressing the whole journey of life (birth-childhood-friendships-adolescence-love-coupling-copulating-birthing-growing old) into eighty minutes narrated by the great Dudley Moore.

So basically, Dudley Moore can tell you every major stage of your life through an allegory with dogs in eighty minutes, and Ben Tanzer can map out for you the disconnect that happens in so many groups of friends with archetypes that are actually real characters in 220 pages. Life is simple, and that's depressing.

But also kind of beautiful in it's reassurance for the things we do that we wish we could re-do, the things that we did't know how to do that we had to, and on and on and on. The lessons we had to learn, and now have to live with. It captures that late-teens-into-twenties-what-the-fuck-is-going-on-here-people-paradigm-shift that we all have to claw through."